NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

By mid-June I shed my birding skin and grow another, one that is confused by invertebrates and flowers. My current favourite place, Park Downs - just a couple of miles from home - has several stands of Hogweed (above), a common plant that deserves close scrutiny. Just look at a flowerhead and be amazed! This is fairly typical of what you can find - a chaos of feeding invertebrates, some so small that they can be easily overlooked. And now zoom in... This is where I get confused. What are they? The 'black' bugs with the red side-patches (cuneus) I believe to be Closterotomus trivialis , which has only been recorded in England since 2009, but appears to be very common at Park Downs! The smaller, dull beetles are (I think), Bruchus rufipes . The beetle on the far right is a Varied Carpet Beetle (fairly confident about this one). But what of the black beetle with the long antennae at the top left? Martin F - help please!! As you can tell, my knowledge of bugs and beetles is rudimen...

Hogweed, similar to the one that I was staring at this week, sans the insects. I bumped into Yossarian (aka Adam) this lunchtime. He is a much valued visitor to this blog and a fellow Spurs supporter to boot. We got chatting about many things, including my recent 'slump' - see the last post for an explanation of that. Adam appreciates natural history on a wider scale to me. He goes out into the countryside and takes in the 'greater whole' around him, whereas I tend to go out and obsess on the minutiae, trying to disentangle and identify the species that are before me. He said that he wanted to get closer to my approach and I replied that I was having a break from all of that and was moving closer to his! It was brought home to me earlier this week as I stared at the flowerheads of a stand of Hogweed. They were all crawling with life - bees, wasps, hoverflies, beetles, micro moths - and I stood entranced. So many species, with dazzling colours and varied shapes. I co...